Tag Archives: publishing models

Post navigation

In all the recent debate on the merits of the digital-first strategy for publishers (neatly encapsulated today by Mathew Ingram), there is one strand of discussion that never quite comes to the foreground. Though the phrase digital first is often contrasted with digital only, for many—mostly the critics, but perhaps some of the advocates as well—the implicit message is the same: “Digital rocks! Print sucks!”

To my mind, that’s not what digital first means. The point of the phrase is not about which medium is better. It’s about which medium people use. And that medium is sometimes print, sometimes web, sometimes social, sometimes mobile, sometimes video, sometimes audio. Digital-first is about distributing content through all those media in the most efficient way possible. Digital is first, but not necessarily foremost.

The idea, as I see it, is not to privilege digital media over other forms, but to use a digital workflow to move seamlessly and efficiently from one format to another. That, of course is easier said than done. Alan Mutter puts it plainly:

“Publishers today are struggling to pivot to a new business model that they call ‘digital first’—whatever that means—while managing through the seemingly relentless decline of their existing one. Mastering either of those tasks individually would be daunting. The challenge of doing both at the same time is nothing less than epic.”

As Mutter points out, one reason that newspapers have failed so miserably at the digital transition is that they “unimaginatively tried to export their formerly successful print business model to the digital realm. ” That is, they employed a print-first strategy. And the print model is simply too rigid and too ponderous to be the starting point in modern publishing.

This, I take it, is what Digital First Media CEO John Paton, muchcriticized of late, is getting at when he said that his “digital first strategy is centered on the cost-effective creation of content and sales and not the legacy modes of production.”

The ultimate goal of digital first should not be to substitute one medium for another, but to achieve medium independence. Technology is shifting ground daily, and the way people interact is changing with it. As publishers, if we want to interact with them, we have to be able to deliver our content when they want it, where they want it, and how they want it. Such dexterity is only possible by going digital first.

In identifying the key aspects and implications of the business news startup from Atlantic Media, Doctor touched on a number of key points for any business-oriented publication. One in particular stood out for me:

Call it underwriting, sponsorship, or share of voice, Quartz is leaping over the littered landscape of impression-based display advertising and selling sponsorships. It will start with four sponsors, who are paying based on their association with The New. In a twist we’ll see more of — another reason Quartz is worth watching — these advertisers are creating their own content for Quartz readers, through something called “Quartz Bulletin.”

Atlantic Media seems to have accepted what Lewis DVorkin keeps telling us (most recently last Thursday): Content is content, whether it comes from an editor or an advertiser. As company president Justin Smith told Adweek, “We believe branded content is going to be an essential part of the site itself.”

Like Forbes, with its AdVoice product, Quartz recognizes that the old advertising model—limited to hermetically sealed ad units dropped beside editorial content—must change. Though the process is fraught with danger, publishers will have to start breaking down the wall that separates editorial from advertising and find a new model for sharing their media with their “advertisers”—a name that may likewise need to change.

Forbes and Atlantic Media may not have found the right model yet. But unlike too many other legacy publishers, they have at least recognized that the old one is broken and will never be mended.

Is Lewis DVorkin a visionary or a sell-out? I can never quite make up my mind. That’s never more true than when he writes about content marketing, as he did last Monday.

As Chief Product Officer for Forbes Media he’s done some impressive things to advance the publication’s online and social-media presence, and his “Copy Box” column is essential new-media reading. But whenever he explains AdVoice, the Forbes approach to mixing editorial contributions from advertisers with more traditional editorial, I start feeling queasy.

DVorkin describes AdVoice as an outlet for content marketing, which he defines as “brands using the tools of digital media and social sharing to behave like original-content publishers.” As he goes on to say, the “idea that a company—as a brand and marketer—can be an expert content creator and reach an audience by disintermediating reporters is confusing, threatening and scary to an entire profession that had its way for a century.”

True enough. But content marketing itself doesn’t worry me. As long-time readers of this blog know, I generally like the idea of content marketing.

Where I get uneasy with content marketing, though, is when it starts to look more like advertising.

I think of content marketing as owned media rather than paid media, as published by the originating brand itself, that is, rather than by and under another brand. So when DVorkin talks about integrating his advertisers’ content-marketing efforts into the Forbes brand, I worry that he’s really talking about advertorial.

His first line of defense against that charge is full disclosure. AdVoice, he says, is “a fully transparent way for marketers to publish and curate content on Forbes.com and in our magazine.”

But is transparency an adequate defense? When a publication buys content (from staff writers or contributors), that clearly counts as editorial. But when the publication is paid to publish it (by advertisers), is it still editorial?

For a traditional publisher, the answer would be no. In buying content, a publication is essentially saying that it is good, that it will serve the readers well. When the publication is paid to publish it, though, all bets are off. Good or bad, it doesn’t matter: it’s an ad, not editorial.

But, radically, DVorkin argues against such differentiation between an advertiser’s content and, say, Forbes’s own editorial: “content is content, and transparency makes it possible for many different credible sources to provide useful information.” To a traditionalist, that sounds plain wrong, if not evil.

But of course Forbes is in DVorkin’s view anything but a traditional publication. It is, rather, “a brand-building platform for journalists and expert voices.” In his model, the publisher does not differentiate and ordain content, but simply hosts it without prejudice:

For FORBES, everything we do cascades from a belief that there are five vital constituencies in the media business, each with a different agenda. FORBES certainly has a voice. So does the journalist, the consumer, the social community and the marketer. . . . AdVoice is organic to our experience, not an add on. Our marketing partners use the same tools to post and engage with readers that I do. AdVoice content appears on our home page; it breaks into the Most Popular module when rising page views push it there; it appears dynamically in our real-time stream and channel streams.

In other words, the publisher is no longer a gatekeeper for content, but just one of several equally privileged voices. The publisher’s role now is to provide and share a common platform for community voices.

I’m old enough to find this vision troublesome, and radical enough to see its potential. So I guess I still can’t answer my opening question. What do you think?

If you happen to be attending the event, I hope you’ll drop in to my presentation. I’ll be talking about how the transformation from industrial media to social media is changing career paths for editor, reporters, and other content creators, and outlining nine keys to a successful new-media career. I’ll also be giving away a few copies of the paperback edition of the New-Media Survival Guide to audience members hardy enough to stay with me through the entire talk.

If you can’t make it to SIPA, fear not. I expect there will be more than a few attendees reporting on the event. Look for the #SIPADC hashtag. My hectic schedule and a deplorable lack of ambition will probably limit my own efforts at live coverage, but I hope to manage at least an occasional tweet.

In an article earlier this week explaining why she won’t be self-publishing anytime soon, Edan Lepucki paused to enumerate the hurdles facing traditional publishers. The last in her list was “how to make people actually pay for content.” The phrase suggested to me one more challenge she might have added: “How to stop thinking of your customers as peons and thieves.”

It’s troublesome enough that media should be so concerned with how to make people pay. But the phrase implies something worse: that if people aren’t paying for content, they must be stealing it.

I have no issue with paying for content, nor do I think content should always be free. But I’d rather think of the challenge this way: how to create content so good, and a distribution mechanism so simple, that people want to pay for it.

The content market is no longer about control, but collaboration, about equal exchange. The longer traditional media thinks in terms of how they can make their customers do things, the closer they are to extinction.